The chief executives of Airbus and Leonardo, the Italian aerospace and defence group, recently urged Brussels to approve their plan to create a pan-European space company with Thales, the French aerospace and defence group.
Their argument was that by consolidating their three companies, they would have the size and influence to compete against companies outside of Europe – most importantly, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“Without co-operation,” said Lorenzo Mariani of Leonardo, “European industries will never reach the critical mass and the capability to really be worldwide champions.”
Airbus and Thales are right to argue that Europe needs space companies that can compete with SpaceX. But building big companies will not by itself bring genuine space sovereignty to Europe. As Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) grows increasingly crowded with commercial spacecraft, military assets and debris, the ability of operators to detect, track and attribute activity in orbit is becoming vital.
Europe, which has rightly invested in sovereign constellations and space infrastructure, can’t rely solely on having more satellites in space. Those satellites have to be protected – and protection starts with knowing what’s going on.
It’s true that Europe is starting to strengthen its space surveillance. There are initiatives like the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) partnership, and IRIS², the European Union’s multi-orbit satellite constellation, which is designed to provide ultra-secure communications and high-speed broadband.
The Polish government has agreed to invest around €640 million ($745 million) in its development; Germany has proposed a separate national low-Earth-orbit (LEO) military satellite constellation as a potential rival or parallel system to IRIS². Europe is now the second-largest contributor to the global (SSA) market with a share of 27.7%; the US, the largest, has a 42.4% share.
But concerns remain. In the absence of a clear picture of what is happening in orbit, Europe will struggle to prevent its adversaries from probing and even sabotaging its critical space infrastructure, as well as to protect that infrastructure from growing debris and other spacecraft. It’s effectively blind, and in such a dangerous and volatile time, bad decisions, hostile activity for example, can produce very bad outcomes.
Consider that China is coming on in leaps and bounds in terms of its orbital manoeuvring capabilities, with its satellites now able to approach, inspect and potentially interfere with other spacecraft. The US Space Force has described this as “dogfighting in space“.
For us in Europe, it’s enough to recognise that, with regard to space, China is advancing rapidly and investing heavily, and if we want to achieve our longstanding goal of strategic autonomy, we need to close that gap as quickly as we can.
That goal of autonomy, when it was first proposed more than 10 years ago by policymakers in the European Union, seems much less abstract now than it did then. It speaks to what the chief executives of Airbus, Leonardo and Thales have been saying: that it is necessary, not just preferable, for Europe to have its own space champion.
Faced with a war on the Eastern border, widespread grey-zone aggression – Polish intelligence says there’s now one Russian hybrid attack on NATO every two days – and shifting geopolitical interests, as well as the rise of China, Europe must be able to defend its own interests, with or without support. Strategic autonomy also makes Europe a better friend to its allies after spending many years under the US security umbrella.
But what must be understood is that mega-mergers alone don’t bring strategic autonomy. Our autonomy rests to a meaningful degree on whether Europe can independently understand, monitor and protect the space domain.
That is what will enable Europe to detect, for example, whether a satellite is shadowing an IRIS², or whether a manoeuvre is routine or hostile, or whether a space collision is possible or imminent, and to do without American technology and data.
That all depends on SSA developing a richer, wider network of ground sensors, on achieving better data fusion, on using artificial intelligence to process the growing volume of orbital data, and crucially putting more sovereign optical payloads in space.
To the challenge “why not radar?“, the answer is this: optical payloads can do things radar can’t. Radar is exceptionally good at tracking the position and velocity of objects in Low-Earth Orbit. But optical sensors allow operators to identify and characterise satellites, observe their orientation and detect any unusual behaviour.
As satellites become more manoeuvrable thanks to gains in propulsion and autonomous technology, and as the line between civilian and military activity in orbit blurs, understanding what a spacecraft is doing is becoming just as crucial as knowing where it is.
The intelligence that allows us to make that distinction will increasingly underpin everything from collision avoidance to military decision-making.
The companies developing those payloads are, for the most part, not the big primes, but smaller, highly specialised companies. And it’s for this reason that Europe needs to kick its decades-long habit of depending on a handful of big companies for its DefenceTech, and aim to foster the kind of environment in which both those large integrating companies and specialist suppliers exist in a complementary relationship.
Generous sustained investment, as well as closer cooperation between European governments and industry will be necessary. Common standards and greater interoperability across Europe and NATO will also be key to avoid waste and duplication and strengthen ties internationally.
And, needless to say, SSA will have to be understood as critical infrastructure. Because Europe’s challenge is not just about scale. If it can’t independently see what’s happening in orbit, it will necessarily remain dependent on others for one of the most basic aspects of space power and resilience. Put more simply still: you can’t protect your spacecraft from what you can’t see.
Source: EU-Startups
